Old Fordson Tractor at Clermont Museum

We don’t have a problem with flies or mosquitoes in Moranbah, probably due to the fact that there isn’t much for them to thrive on as it hasn’t actually rained for more than 10 minutes since before Christmas. Australian flies are so much more intrusive than English ones and very persistent. In England you brush a fly off your arm and it tends to get the message and go and find someone else to annoy, but here they are so much bolder - brush them away and within a few seconds they will be sat exactly where they were before, smirking at you. Therefore one or two flies on a walk can transform you into an irritable, muttering lunatic with arms flailing all over the place. This is obviously a form of entertainment and amusement to those people driving past who can’t see the minute cause of your distress. The final straw is when they actually start crawling up your nose and you have to almost pick them off your face to get rid of them.

While I’m on this subject, I was recently reading the latest edition of the Australian Geographic which stated that there are 20 – 30000 species of flies in Australia out of about 250000 species in the world. This took me a long time to digest, a quarter of a million different types of fly?!?! Who on earth has dedicated their life into logging and, presumably, naming these? How would you know if you had just swatted one in your house that was near to extinction or yet to be discovered? The same article, entitled ‘Fear and Loathing and Flies’, states that one of the earliest Europeans to have set foot in Australia, William Dampier, wrote in January 1688 after his observation of the Australian Bushfly: “The inhabitants of the country are among the miserablest people in the World… their eye lids are always half closed to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here that no fanning will keep them from coming to one’s face; and without the assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into one’s nostrils, and mouth too if the lips are not shut very close…”.
The article then goes on to say how we have tried to control them and kill them over the years. Here in Moranbah, as I said earlier, we have hardly any flies so can count ourselves lucky. I have heard that in other areas of Australia William Dampier’s observation is not far from the truth.